Archives
Browse the linkblog archives.

Saturday 30th May, 2020 #

  • Type safety with native JavaScript - With all the recent attention to typing in javascript it’s interesting to see an approach that tries to use native javascript, it’s in no way as complete a solution as Typescript but interesting none the less
  • The rise of React
  • Smashing Magazine review of their recent adventures and exploration in hosting re-imagined online events and conferences
  • tc39er.us a podcast where we talk to the TC39 delegates about JavaScript and everything else!
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Thursday 28th May, 2020 #

  • Tina a.k.a. swissmiss shares some of her favourite blogs on the 15 year anniversary of her blog - I really like reading her Linkpacks and design focussed content, I also like the bring back blogging trend that I’ve been seeing in some places around the web recently
  • SpaceX is launching some astronauts into space later today (20:33 UTC)
  • Facebook’s latest TikTok-inspired app is a music-making platform called Collab
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Wednesday 20th May, 2020 #

  • Styling Components In React - I’ve always gravitated more towards javascript than css in web development, while it’s great to see things are moving along, these new css techniques appear quite strange to me
  • Blogging is not dead
  • New York Times phasing out all 3rd-party advertising data
  • Introducing Facebook Shops - Helping Small Businesses Sell Online - Looks like a very comprehensive suite of tools for selling products online and it’s free
  • Microsoft’s Project Reunion bridges Win32 and UWP divide, again - This time they are using a similar technique to polyfills which gained popularity in web development
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Tuesday 19th May, 2020 #

  • Power Tool Manufacturers and Who Really Owns Them - I find these industry brand charts quite fascinating, but also potentially very useful if your line of business overlaps
  • The NASA hunt for dark energy and exoplanets has some big news - Announcement tomorrow - Wednesday, May 20, at 11 AM EDT / 8 AM PDT
  • Amazon’s AI tool can plan collision-free paths for 1,000 warehouse robots
  • Deezer release music source separation engine called Spleeter under MIT license
  • Disney’s Head of Streaming Is New TikTok C.E.O.
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Monday 18th May, 2020 #

  • Comparing Social Media Outlets for Developer Tips - It’s interesting to get concrete examples of how modern social medias help to further the conversation and discussion, and the experiment seems to show that blogging still is one of the best ways
  • Edward Saatchi on virtual beings - AI is the next great art form - This isn’t an area I’ve been particularly interested in to date, but having listened to this interview, I feel there might be some interesting avenues to explore - it appears to be relatively new ground, probably a lot of possibilities
  • It’s Time to Get Back Into RSS
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Sunday 17th May, 2020 #

  • Create your own snippets in VS Code
  • I thought of a cool GIphy integration, turns out it already exists, but I think it could be implemented in a much better way, you really want to have something similar to a soundboard that you can load up with gifs in advance so you can drop them in at the right time using a keyboard shortcut
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Saturday 16th May, 2020 #

  • How Facebook Could Use Giphy to Collect Your Data - This article takes the privacy angle, which is a totally valid concern, but honestly I kind of glazed over this piece because I'm more interested in wondering how the deal could lead to some cool products
  • Facebook to buy Giphy for $400 million - I’ve loaded this page about 20 times today while doing some testing but my eyes stopped scanning after the first word (I think I’m completely mentally checked out of Facebook), but now I’ve finally a bit of time for a cup of tea and actually read the whole headline, and I’m like wow that’s a phenomenal acquisition, Giphy is such a cool website and the synergy with Instagram feels like it could go in a lot of interesting directions
  • In defense of the modern web - A response to the article from Tuesday, I like when there is a worthwhile public discussion about javascript and the web like this, I’m not exactly sure where to find these lately, I feel like it was more commonplace in the early days of blogging, I’m wondering whether a webdev Techmeme would be a good idea (webdevmeme?)
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Friday 15th May, 2020 #

  • Smashing Meets! - the online webdev magazine is holding an online meet-up next week with talks and interactive activities, it looks pretty cool
  • Debug anything - Series exploring how to use the VSCode debugger, I'm keen to see the rest of the articles in this series as I use the debugger a lot, based on this article looks like it could be a good series
  • npm v7 Series - first in a series of posts detailing the future of npm, interesting to see their direction now that they are backed my a big company
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Sunday 10th May, 2020 #

  • Node.js CLI Apps Best Practices - A collection of curated best practices on how to build successful, empathic and user-friendly Node.js Command Line Interface (CLI) applications
  • Creating A Real-World CLI App With Node
  • Multicloud MySQL - Podcast from Software Engineering Daily, worth a listen just to hear discussion, language and concepts around deployment of apps on multi-cloud architectures of highly available Kubernetes clusters - this is how things are setup at YouTube
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Friday 8th May, 2020 #

  • The Original Cookie specification from 1997 was GDPR compliant - An interesting read, the article highlights relevant parts of the original specification, showing how it was intended to work and what actually ended up happening - It feels to me that the browsers could have better cookie management tools
  • How Facebook’s oversight board could rewrite the rules of the entire internet - The thing that’s interesting about this new oversight board is how they’ve structured it, its much more than a Supreme Court style moderation board, it’s a factory for spinning off multiple such moderation boards, and that could indeed be quite a big deal
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Thursday 7th May, 2020 #

  • Production ready Node.js REST API Setup using TypeScript - I like the app structure used in this tutorial, feels like a domain driven architecture, using layers to separate concerns
  • Tackling Webdev as a Bioinformatician: why is it so hard? - This is such a wonderfully level headed post, full of situations that have happened to me many times too - webdev really is difficult, an endless list of things that don’t work, progress is really slow at times
  • I'm looking for medium sized Express apps written in Typescript - This is the typescript implementation from the Realworld demo project
  • New Repo: minimal-express-typescript - Everyone is banging on about Typescript like it's going out of fashion, but after searching for several hours for clear examples of dev environment setup, it's apparent that there aren't many that are in a real life context, so I made this repo that sets up a basic dev environment for an Express app written in Typescript that you can run in the VSCode debugger
  • Github Codespaces - "Codespaces sets up a cloud-hosted, containerized, and customizable VS Code environment" - According to the description, it will be possible to step through code in a debugger right in your browser, and you will also be able to connect your local VS Code directly to a Codespace
  • Florian Schneider, Kraftwerk co-founder, dies aged 73
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Wednesday 6th May, 2020 #

  • Why a “Shelter in Place Film Festival” beats bingeing video right now - More explorations of online / virtual conferences, there is a lot of nuance to organising a film festival that I was unaware of, the web designer in me found this really interesting
  • It's cool to see the online conferences space get re-invented, SmashingConf Live are putting together something that looks pretty interesting, live collaborative note-taking, slack, conference DJ
  • Google Podcasts will give podcasters more data about their listeners
  • Apple to host virtual Worldwide Developers Conference beginning June 22 free for all developers
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Saturday 2nd May, 2020 #

  • typescript-exercises - A collection of challenging TypeScript exercises
  • A Visual Guide To React Mental Models - It's a bit long, but there are some nice diagrams in this article and I like the general idea of describing mental models used to understand frameworks - One of the things that trips me up in React is that the JSX tree looks like HTML but it has all these extra layers that have nothing todo with the actual presentation of the page, like for instance how routers are implemented, it feels to me like JSX munges a load of things that are usually separate into a big soup, but then again there are some things about JSX that I like
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Friday 1st May, 2020 #

  • The Seafloor Is Absolutely Littered in Microplastic - 10 million tons per year get into the sea, mostly from washing clothes that contain synthetic materials
  • I was just looking at some bitcoin charts, and this one stood out to me (make sure to click the "all time" button) - Which is worse dilution or infinite difficulty? Well I guess it depends what we (humanity) are trying to achieve
  • Stocks Are Recovering While the Economy Collapses - That Makes More Sense Than You'd Think - So the Fed has added 8 trillion, other central banks are doing similar, note that the total money supply worldwide is in the region of 50 trillion, I don’t know what it means but these are big numbers - It’s likely I have this wrong but it seems to me that unless you increase your personal stash of money by the same percentage that got added to the total supply then you get poorer
  • Generate Typescript types from Postgres
  • Turning Vue components into reusable npm packages
  • Exploring Node.js Internals - Interesting deep dive into the node core and how the various pieces are connected together
  • middy is a middleware framework for AWS Lambda written in Node.js - I like the syntax, looks pretty good
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